A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

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  To the very patient members of what Chris once called the Crucible: Roz Brody, Mike Holmes, Janet King and C. J. Sansom

  ‘If we are going to sin, we must sin quietly.’

  Eric Griffith-Jones, Attorney General, Kenya, 1957

  Prologue

  She lies in soft tufts of grass, July sun warming her skin. Above her, ash branches droop, heavy with pale seeds. They sway, gently pushed by a southerly breeze. The thick smell of cut hay obliterates every other scent.

  This spinney used to be her special place. Her secret. As a small child she used to scramble through the blackthorn to escape here when her mother needed help mucking out the chickens, or when her annoying older sister got on her nerves. They never found her. A hidden dip between old hedgerows thick with dogwood. A perfect hideaway.

  Around her, roots swell, nuts thicken. The berries of a cuckoopint redden. A fat bee stuffs itself into the bell of a foxglove flower, fizzing angrily as it tries to back out. She lies so still a gatekeeper butterfly rests on her hand, opens its wings, the dark russet colour making her skin look paler than it is. Over the last two weeks it has been dry and warm.

  Yesterday, while her sister had worked harvesting hay in the top field, she had sprawled face down on a towel by the estuary, bikini top unbuckled, soaking up ultraviolet. From above, on the footpath that ran across the railway bridge, a trainspotter had spied on her, licking his lips and focusing his binoculars on the pale bulge of flesh that pressed against the ground.

  ‘Alex,’ a voice calls now. That’s her big sister. A flat-chested young woman, jealous of her younger sister’s beauty and idleness. Of the way the men flock around her. ‘Alex?’

  Her sister has been calling her name for an hour, at least.

  ‘It’s your bloody turn to do the milking. I done it this morning.’ A thick West Country accent.

  It has been a summer of discotheques and cigarettes. Excitement. Glamour. Periods. A Bri-Nylon bra that she had to buy with her own pocket money. Real French perfume. Rich men with cars, eager to take her out. Dad shouting at her for coming in so late. Mum complaining that she should have phoned. The magnificent power of beauty in an age in which the young rule the world.

  There are more important things too that touch somewhere much deeper. Watching A Hard Day’s Night at the Riviera. Crying silently to John, Paul and George singing ‘If I Fell’. And that new one, ‘It’s All Over Now’. The way Jeanne Moreau crosses her legs in Jules et Jim.

  Everything new that is blowing away everything old. A life beyond this stupid, drudging farm.

  Alexandra has a list she keeps in her other Secret Place. Not this one. The loose skirting board behind her bedside table in her stupidly small room. She made it on New Year’s Day (after skinny-dipping in the estuary at night, drunk on cider).

  1964

  I WILL BE 17 AND THIS WILL BE MY BEST YEAR EVER. I PROMISE I WILL–

  Go in a plane

  Meet J. Lennon

  Do the beast with two backs!!

  Learn 2 drive moped

  SMOKE FRENCH FAGS

  Go to Liverpool

  Go to London

  Go to Africa

  LEAVE HOME 4 EVER

  ‘It’s not bloody fair,’ the sister is shouting.

  Far away, the beetle stops. Wiggles its antennae in the warm air. Sensilla activate. Process what they’ve gathered.

  On the grey tree trunk it clings to, the beetle pauses a moment. Then waves the antennae again. With an almost inaudible click, the wing cases pop open. Two veiny wings, larger than it seemed possible for it to store in that slender abdomen, emerge and spread.

  It has found its purpose.

  Buzzing faintly, it flies, following the signal of airborne molecules. They pour towards it over woodlands green with summer leaves, over cow pastures and fields full of wheat, over warming water. And as it travels, their scent grows stronger.

  Long, black and grey, almost ant-like, it is not a beautiful beetle, but it is a fortunate one. It has been an exceptionally warm July.

  After an hour it lands on red mud. Close. Very close.

  A scrabble through twigs and seedlings and then it is there.

  Home.

  Without pause, it starts to cut through soft skin with its mandibles. The flies are already here, buzzing. They will make maggots for the beetle’s progeny to feed on.

  The sun moves slowly across the sky. The dappled light travels in the opposite direction across her nakedness. The chiffchaffs start their banal song again.

  Her dad is shouting. ‘Alexandra!’ Anxious now. A quiet man who rarely shouts. But he is bellowing, ‘Alexandra?’

  Always Alexandra, never Alex.

  At dusk a badger, cautious of her human scent, ducks back down into the sett and waits, snout sniffing the air.

  The bluebottles are crowding where her nipples had once been; where the knife had removed them. Dark black blood-crusted rings on her teenage breasts. They are laying eggs on her skin, so the maggots can burrow beneath it. Flies crowd into her open mouth, skitter across her dry eyeballs.

  A puffball breaks the ground by her thigh. At night a vixen approaches, cautious at first. She trots round her, sniffing before tentatively starting to feed where the skin is already broken on the belly. But a dog fox barks somewhere and she leaves the feast.

  The list lies undiscovered behind the skirting.

  She has smoked Gauloises and had sex. The other items are still unticked and will remain that way. The local police who will search her room, turning out her drawers, peering under the mattress, will never find it. Nor who mutilated her, tortured her and left her dead like this on the farm where she had been born sixteen years earlier.

  ONE

  1969

  ‘Paddy. Wake up. You were screaming.’

  A woman’s voice, close to his ear.

  Cathal Breen opened his eyes but saw nothing in the dark. What was a woman doing in his flat? How did she get in? Had he brought someone home with him? Had he been drunk? His head felt heavy enough. But no. Not drunk.

  ‘Was he having another nightmare?’ Another woman’s voice in the darkness. Two women?

  Breen leaned over to switch on the bedside lamp and hit a wall hard with his fingertips. A wall next to his bed? What was that doing there?

  Fingers smarting, he realised, fuzzily at first, that this was not his bed at all. He was not at home in London.

  It was starting to come back to him as he surfaced from the dark. He had been dreaming about the shooting again. He was here to convalesce from his injuries. That pain in his shoulder; the bullet wound. Where was here?

  He turned to the other side of the bed, almost knocking the bedside lamp to the floor as he fumbled for the switch.

  Light. He blinked.

  They were standing around his bed as he struggled to wake: Helen Tozer and the strange one who called herself Hibou. Signed off sick, he was at the Tozers’ farm in Devon.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Did we wake you?’

  ‘You were having a bad dream.’

  He was still panting. Helen sat on the bed next to him and put her cold hand
on his forehead. Breen started to relax.

  Hibou hovered at the end of the bed. ‘What were you dreaming about?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Breen.

  ‘Shh,’ Helen scolded Hibou. ‘Not now.’

  He knew where he was finally. The dead girl’s room.

  ‘You’re the one who’s always telling me that if I don’t talk about stuff like that, I’ll explode,’ said Hibou. ‘He should talk, too, after what happened to him.’

  In his dream he had been shot again; only this time it was him who had fallen from the tower block, not Cox. He focused on his watch. Ten minutes to five. The girls would be getting up for work soon anyway.

  He could already hear Helen’s mother downstairs, stoking up the stove. She would appear soon with the first of her mugs of tea.

  He sat up properly now, fully awake. Behind the curtain, it was black outside. Winter was hanging on.

  Helen stroked his forehead. ‘Poor Paddy. You need a bit of time to get better, don’t you? Not just from the wound, is it?’

  It was soothing, her hand against his skin. Like a mother’s, almost.

  ‘It would be better if he talked about it, though, wouldn’t it?’ said Hibou. ‘I mean, he almost died. That has to mess with your head, doesn’t it?’

  Hibou would be seventeen this week, but looked older. It wasn’t just the borrowed winceyette nightdress. It was the visible curve of her body beneath it. He closed his eyes again. Two women in a bedroom with him; a man, he should be happy, but he wasn’t. He was losing all sense of himself. He woke up scared. He didn’t feel like a policeman any more. Something had been taken.

  And he shouldn’t be here, anyway. He didn’t belong. The bedroom was not his own. It was the dead girl’s. Tozer’s sister.

  It would be better if he talked about it, he thought.

  No one talked about the dead girl in whose room he slept any more. Cathal Breen understood that. Some things you hide.

  He had been on the Tozers’ farm a week now. But though they didn’t talk about her, not a day went past when she wasn’t present in some way. The pauses in the conversation. The flicker in her mother’s eyes and the long silences at the dinner table. The photograph on the dresser downstairs of them all standing next to the family car: a Morris Oxford. Mrs Tozer in the middle, Mr Tozer next to her with his arm around Alexandra, who smiled brightly at the camera. Helen standing a little apart from the rest, frowning. Alexandra: the beautiful one, feminine and womanly even as a teenager. Helen: the difficult one, long-limbed and awkward. The space between them, even when Alex had been alive.

  Time passed so slowly here. Every hour was like lead. It was driving him mad. Around eight he got up, dressed slowly, then mooned around the house.

  ‘Are you up, dear? That’s nice?’

  Read the paper. Tried a Len Deighton book. Tried the crossword. Gave up.

  ‘Where you going, m’dear?’ called Mrs Tozer from the kitchen.

  He was a Londoner. A police sergeant. There was nothing for him to do in a place like this except eat and sleep and grow sluggish on Mrs Tozer’s food. But sleep brought the nightmares.

  ‘Just out for a walk,’ he called back, irritated that she had noticed him leaving. He had hoped to make it out of the front door without attracting any attention.

  ‘You wrap up and be careful. There’s a wind.’

  He had spent the first days in bed, feeling the farmhouse wrapping itself around him. Its thick walls and ticking clocks were deadening. Mrs Tozer’s food made him pasty. He needed to get out.

  He walked through the passageway down to the front door, conscious of being observed by a second pair of eyes, pale in the darkness. Mr Tozer, Helen’s father, lurked in the living room, smoking cigarette after cigarette behind drawn curtains. He’s not been himself, they said. Breen had tried to make small talk with him but failed. His only topic of conversation seemed to be cows, and recently he had even lost interest in them. Would it be better if old man Tozer talked about it?

  It was a lightless morning. Outside the front door, Breen looked right, down to the black estuary, then left, up towards the hills. Instead he walked straight ahead, crossing the rutted driveway and into the front field. The grass was brown, dead and thistly. He kept away from the middle, edging around towards the clump of trees, assuming he was less likely to be spotted if he kept close to the hedgerows.

  The ground was slippery and uneven. He had to be careful. He had only been out of bed a day and the wound in his shoulder was still sore, his arm wrapped up in a sling within his coat.

  He looked down at his brogues. He should have worn better shoes. The leather soles slid on the wet grass and he fretted about getting cow shit on them.

  The spinney was less choked in winter but after more than four years, the thorns that the police had cut their way through to reach the site had grown back.

  Breen peered into the dark depression, but could make out nothing. The undergrowth was too thick, the light too low. Between the finger and thumb of his good arm, he clutched one of the bramble stalks and started to tug it out of the way. Instead the stem flailed in the air, snagging on his duffel coat. Picking it off, a single thorn wedged into the round of his thumb. Breen pulled his hand away and stared at the round glob of blood that emerged from his skin, then put it in his mouth and sucked it clean.

  Now he peered a little further into the darkness, trying to guess where the body had been left. He could smell rotten mud and standing water. He felt stupid, ill-equipped for this, one bad arm tucked inside the coat, and almost turned back. The farmhouse would be warm. Mrs Tozer was making scones.

  A cry came from one of the upper fields. Breen ducked low. He didn’t want to be seen, not here at least.

  ‘Steady. Steady.’ A woman’s voice, still far away. ‘Back her up.’

  Breen relaxed. The shout had not been intended for him. He had not been spotted. He straightened again. It was Helen shouting orders to Hibou somewhere over the ridge of the hillock. Winter days were short on the farm. There was a lot to get done in a few hours. Helen Tozer worked hard. Hibou didn’t seem to mind the life either. There was a new pinkness in her cheeks. She seemed to love it here.

  Breen leaned forward once more, peering into the black, past the thickets and an ancient rusting bed frame. The local police would have searched it thoroughly of course. There would be nothing to find. It was pointless coming here. All the same, he kicked the debris aside to push his way further into the copse.

  Go careful now. You are supposed to be recuperating.

  There was a hint of old pathway, leading down. Encouraged, he grabbed a dead elder branch for support. He was only going to have a quick look, wasn’t he? He leaned forward again.

  Then his left foot slipped on the slick red mud.

  A loud snap. The dead branch gave. Body twisted as feet skidded from under him, thumping down sideways onto the cold ground. Rooks exploding into the air above him.

  Pain, pain, pain; his left shoulder screamed. Blinding, all-enveloping pain.

  He curled up on the cold wet ground, eyes firmly clamped shut, trying not to shout out loud.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  The smell of musky rot. And the mud and rabbit shit all over him.

  Now Cathal Breen lay back in the same bed again, in the room that had been hers.

  ‘So you’re a policeman,’ said the doctor. A man with yellow ridged fingernails and huge eyebrows.

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen. The pain had dulled now.

  ‘Well, well.’

  The doctor cut another piece of pink plaster and stuck it to the bandage on Breen’s shoulder. Breen tried not to wince as the doctor pressed down.

  ‘From London?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Breen again.

  ‘The big smoke, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Friend of young Helen’s, I hear?’ The doctor’s nicotine fingers shook as he laboured.

  ‘I worked with her when
she was in the Met.’

  In half-moon glasses, the man tilted his head back a little to examine his work, looking down his nose at Breen. ‘Down here to get better, I hear?’

  ‘That was the idea.’

  ‘I knew that wouldn’t last with young Helen. No job for a lady, the police,’ said the doctor. ‘I know her mother’s happy to have her back where she belongs, isn’t she?’

  ‘I am so glad,’ said Mrs Tozer from the doorway. Helen’s mother. Rounder, shorter than her angular daughter.

  ‘I expect she’s helping her father with the farm now?’

  ‘Hel’s doing most of it these days. Mr Tozer’s not been himself.’

  ‘No. I heard that.’

  ‘We got the new girl helping too. From London. Another waif and stray.’

  ‘All mouths to feed, Mrs T.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I like a bit of company. It was too quiet when Helen was away.’

  The doctor tutted. Licked his lips. Cut the last section of sticking plaster. The scab had cracked and bled again because of the fall.

  ‘A bullet wound, I gather,’ said the doctor finally. He’d clearly been dying to say something about it throughout the whole time he’d been there.

  Breen looked at Helen’s mother, still hovering by the bedroom door. ‘Yes,’ said Breen.

  The doctor whistled. ‘Only, you don’t get a lot of those around here.’ A giggle.

  ‘I washed the shirt,’ said Mrs Tozer. ‘Left it to soak in cold water. A bit of vinegar will have the blood out.’

  ‘Very good, Mrs T.’

  ‘He going to be OK, Doctor?’

  Breen lay back and looked at the cracks on the ceiling. He knew what the doctor was dying to ask him. But people round here were not like Londoners. They didn’t come out with it. How did you get shot? They were just as nosy, probably, only didn’t show it.

  The doctor frowned as he worked. ‘The projectile must have grazed the clavicle a little, I should say. You were lucky.’

  ‘That’s what they told me in London.’

  The doctor replaced his scissors in his black leather case.